Well, your learn something new every day. Today I learned that there’s actually a neat class in the .NET Framework that’s called TextFieldParser and resides in the Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIo namespace.

Previously I wrote a post about making sure the Windows PATH environment variable doesn’t exceed a certain length.

I found out it’s possible to use other environment variables to help you shorten the path. For example, you could store the C:\Program Files (x86) prefix in a new environment variable name PA1 and the C:\Program Files prefix in PA2.

You can then write %PA1%\Microsoft\… instead of C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\… in your PATH variable.

NOTE: The new environment variables must be parsed by the system before the PATH variable, which also means they must appear beforePATH when sorted alphabetically.

For a couple of days I’ve had major trouble with my work notebook. After installing new Visual Studios (2012 and 2013), all of a sudden various system software stopped working.

For example several applications could no longer be started using the pinned icons in the task bar. Also, when trying to invoke some system dialogs in the Control Panel I got error messages like %windir%\system32\xyz.exe was not found. Or the strange fact that all the entries in the Start Menu lost their symbols…

After some days of much cursing and swearing, several attempts of restoring previous Restore Points, etc., I got a hint that solved my problem:

The content of the PATH environment variable may not be longer than 2048 characters! If it is, neither the PATH variable, nor any other %..% system variable will work.

I shortened the path, rebooted, problem solved. Welcome to Windows 7, where the PATH variable is still limited in length…

Sometimes you need to round DateTimes in T-SQL to a certain DateTime component. For example, you need to truncate the minutes and seconds and only keep the date and the hour. To do so, you can do this:

SELECT DATEADD(hh, DATEDIFF(hh, '20000101', getdate()), '20000101')

This turns 20120101 13:59:59 into 20120101 13:00:00. Please note that the comparison date 20000101 is totally arbitrary. You can use any day before the date you’re truncating.